Last weekend the inlaws and I finally explored Fagan Park in northern Sydney together. It’s a 55 hectare former estate that was donated to the Hornsby Shire in 1988. It’s gorgeous. There was so much to see and explore, but I was especially taken by the landscape. We couldn’t have picked nicer weather for it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-18. Last weekend the inlaws and I finally explored Fagan Park in northern Sydney together. It’s a 55 hectare former estate that was do...

La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...

Tech companies structurally depend on writing to serve as evidence, in the same way that Bitcoin depends on proof-of-work hashing. However, in the last few years, LLMs have started to undermine this practice. How can writing be like proof-of-work? When I’m writing something at work, it’s not always to communicate an idea. Sometimes it’s because having a piece of writing is useful as evidence : of compliance with some process, of the fact that I put in effort, or of the fact that I know ...

It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge . It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Gold...

Prasanna Vijayanathan , Renzo Sanchez-Silva When Jake Paul and Mike Tyson stepped into the ring in November 2024, we delivered the fight to roughly 65 million concurrent streams. On an ordinary day our infrastructure takes in more than 2 billion requests and handles upwards of 38 million real-time logging events every second. At that scale, the whole picture doesn’t fit into a single engineering team’s head or onto a single dashboard. With more Live content, Podcasts and real-time streams, ...

Kevin Kelly 's The Inevitable articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it. One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book: "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" "The bulk of AI will be specia...

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap , coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable. I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-92392 for the project curl , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-free in HTTP/2 upload retries where cleanup turns leftover upload data into a new request and leaves a pointer to a freed Curl_easy handle (apparently freeing it was only a suggestion), allowing a malicious server to achieve remote code execution under specific conditions . T...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Many new printing options The Advanced print dialog has new options, each with a matching -print-settings value: Print each page at its document page size ( paper=auto ) for documents with mixed page sizes ( #533 ) Choose paper source by document page size ( bin=auto ) ( #349 ) Center page horizontally on the paper ( center ) ( #348 ) Stretch pages to fill paper ( stretch ) ( #2220 ) Rotate printout ( rotate=90|1...

We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1 , but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters, all numbers, plus a few extra characters. Base64 represents three bytes with four ASCII characters. Base64 is how email carries attachments, how certificates are stored, how images get embedded in web pages (data URLs), and how bina...

Over at Talk Python, we just launched Talk Python Membership . This is a community of Python developers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts. It’s built around 4 pillars: monthly live tech meetups, a community, bonus episode summaries (coming soon), and no ads for the podcast. Please give it a look over at: talkpython.fm/community We have the first three tech talks already set up. You can see the full details at talkpython.fm/meetups : Talk Python in Production: Building Your Own In...

Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speech-to-text… Source Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work accor...

As an island nation, maritime awareness is essential to Taiwan’s national security. Its coastline stretches more than 1,500 kilometers across the main island and outlying islands, so keeping watch over the surrounding waters requires vessels, sensors, and operators spread over a wide area. Autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can extend surveillance, but adding more USVs also means operators spend more time telling each vessel what to do.   Hivemind is Shield AI’s mission autonomy ...

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I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source code on GitHub Features Go directly to a tab by clicking on it. Shows Duplicate tabs (any tab opened more than once) A special section to show any tabs currently playing audio (video counts if no...

I spent a week creating a new deflate implementation from scratch in C named tugz to provide an Info-ZIP -compatible zip program for w64devkit 2.10.1 (released today). I also replaced busybox-w32 ’s deflate-based unzip , gzip , gunzip , and zcat apps as well. My new deflate performs much better than zlib and on par with libdeflate . In general the new programs are substantially faster and produce slightly smaller outputs than the BusyBox equivalents, which is optimized for si...

Sweden’s labour force grew by 122,000 people in the year to August 2026, while employment rose by 103,000, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB). Unemployment increased by 19,000 as a result. These employment in Sweden statistics cover job totals, jobless rates by group and county, EU rankings, salaries, vacancies and the September 2026 forecast from Konjunkturinstitutet (KI). Employment in Sweden Statistics 5,423,000 people employed in August 2026, up 103,000 on a year earlier 70.9% e...

One of the most wonderful aspects of math is how deep we can get by studying seemingly trivial questions. Consider the roots of unity, where "unity" simply means the number 1. Basics: roots of unity for real numbers Studying the roots of unity usually begins in middle school: what is the square root of 1? Equivalently, what are the solutions to this equation? \[x^2=1\] Well, there are two answers: 1 and -1. Similarly, we can ask the question for higher roots; the third roots are solu...

We’re down to the final four segments, but we only have three walks left to do. The plan for today is to walk segment number 7 and also attach to it the beginning part of number 8. 23km, 870m of ascent, 1250m of descent. Next time, we’ll finish 8th and attach 9th to it, but that’s a problem for future me. I’ll be honest with you, I’m kinda tired of these walks. Especially because this second half stretches across trails I walked countless times before. But I also want to walk the who...

Yesterday I asked three friends a variation of the following question: Is there a website that makes you pause like a piece of architecture? One person provided an answer to the question that was a hypothetical design: a website where, when you scrolled down, you would be moved forward through the archives, with representations of pages to your left and right. Two people – and, additionally, myself – couldn’t think of an answer. 1 I was motivated by the way that tall buildings i...

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged through experiments, failures, and operational experience—each challenge helping us replace a reasonable assumption with a more sensible default. m...

In the OpenAI Math Drop some papers have Lean proofs, others don't, including L = RL = BPL. Why is it hard to formalize results on complexity classes? Let's consider an example, Lautemann's proof that BPP is in \(\Sigma^p_2\). It's a beautiful proof because it comes down to a single formula. I gave the full proof in a 2025 post , but to remind you, here is the setup. Let \(B\) be in BPP, accepted by a probabilistic polynomial-time Turing machine \(M\) with error bounded by \(2^{-n}\). Let...

Previous posts in this series introduced Frml , explained how it checks simplar scalar code and handles contracts between functions , and then discussed how it deals with loops , checks arrays , and checks built-in functions . The final language level, complete , doesn’t add any new features. Instead, it serves as a placeholder in case we want to extend the language further. I’m not going to do this myself, but if you are a student (or a professor looking for projects for students) p...